


The First Time

by KayJ



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Mission Fic, Pre-Relationship, Whump, h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-21
Updated: 2015-10-21
Packaged: 2018-04-27 09:28:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5042980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KayJ/pseuds/KayJ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint and Natasha on a mission, pre-relationship. He gets whumped, she thaws her icy exterior a bit. </p><p>
  <i><br/>“Tasha?”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“What the hell did you call me?” There was a smile in her voice, and he realized he’d called her that out loud, a pet name he used for her in his head but would never dare say to her face.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“Sorry,” he groaned. “Gonna need a little help here. What’s your ETA?”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“Almost on top of you, big guy. Also, I like the nickname. Use it, trademark it, whatever.”<br/></i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The First Time

 

 

Rain blurred his vision as he loosed arrow after arrow into the black night, not even waiting for the satisfying _thwak_ of victory before sighting the next man unlucky enough to be on the roof that night. His accuracy went down only a fraction of a percent in the rain, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t annoying as hell to an archer. _Routine mission_ , Coulson had said. _In and out._ From his precarious perch atop an ancient air conditioning unit near the corner of the roof, Clint realized he needed to learn to read between the lines a little better, because from the moment they showed up in this freezing industrial hellhole deep in the Russian hinterlands, it’s been nothing like routine at all.  

“Nat?” he asked, the question mark apparent in the urgency in his voice. 

“Coming. God Clint, calm down.” The most words she’d spoken to him all night. Pure mission. He’d been her bodyguard from above for a week, while she posed as a buyer and ingrained herself with the smug old man whose employees he was now decimating.He suppressed a smile at her annoyance and grabbed another arrow from his quiver. An instant later it resided in the chest of a burly Russian. The henchmen never seemed to stop coming, pouring out in waves from the two doors occupying diagonal corners of the roof.

He heard yelling to his right, and a glance showed him their target, Dr. Yuri Kahlov, bursting onto the roof followed by a handful of well-dressed bodyguards and one master assassin in hot pursuit, the rain sluicing off her bare arms and darkening the black vest and pants she wore. Natasha tore through the men between her and Kahlov, dispatching them quickly with swift kicks to the back of the knee or an elbow to the nose. Clint fell into the routine, picking off the men she left behind with barely a whisper of his bow. It’s not that she couldn’t kill them on the first try if she wanted, of course not, but right now the target was the most important thing and the men were merely obstacles. It’s what made her and Clint such a good team - she focused on half of the mission, and he on the other half. Rarely did they even speak tactics aloud any more, not now, deep into their second year of being partners. 

A noise like a never-ending roll of thunder tore through the storm around them and Clint spared a moment to scan the skies. From the north side of the roof, a massive black helicopter rose like a giant insect hovering to stare them down. 

“Shit!” Clint yelled, standing and pulling an explosive arrow in the same motion. “Natasha, get down!”

“Clint, don’t you dare!” 

The doctor ran for the copter and jumped well enough for an older guy, launching himself from the edge of the roof to sprawl inside the craft. Hands helped him in and shut the door. 

Natasha ran across the roof, dodging bodies and bullets. “I have a plan, stand down!” The helicopter began to pull away from the roof, the wind from the blades whipping the rain even harder across the rooftop as Clint kept his arrow leveled at the fuselage of the hovering craft.

“A plan?” His eyes scanned the situation, then his heart sank. “No…. Dammit, Nat, seriously?”

She laughed a wild war cry, then jumped from the exact spot the doctor had. She flew through the night air, grabbing hold of the right strut of the helicopter just before it flew out of range. The copter wobbled for a moment, her swinging weight causing the pilot to readjust. 

“What the hell are you doing?” Clint roared, watching her legs dangle ten stories above the cobblestone street below. The helicopter door flew open and a man pointed a pistol toward the struts, firing wildly. An arrow to the center of the forehead took him out an instant later and he toppled backward into the dark interior of the craft. 

Natasha laughed into the comm. “My guardian angel. Won’t be long.” She swung her legs up onto the strut and pulled herself up to a half-crouch, watching the helicopter door warily. The copter banked, trying to dislodge her, and flew from view. Taking Natasha with it.

He swallowed, suddenly agitated. A million thoughts ran through his head, most of them involving his partner either falling from great heights, or being shot at point blank range and then falling from great heights. Either way, not good things. 

A small noise jerked him from his contemplation of the space where the copter had hovered.

“Fuck,” he muttered, and swept his eye across the roof below him, suddenly aware he’d been too focused on his partner for too long, a mistake he knew could bite him in the —

_Oww._

He felt the bullet enter him before he even heard it whisper by - a sniper rifle, no doubt, with a silencer. Quickly, he pulled back with an arm that was now on fire, grimacing, and fired an arrow in the direction the bullet had come from. He heard a scream - no more sniper. But the move had cost him - he had felt the bullet rip muscle as he loosed the arrow, and now he lowered his arm slowly. His bow fell from wet fingers, landing on the metal below with a clang.

Spreading pain in his chest and his arm brought him to his knees, a grunt of air escaping him as his left hand felt for the damage on his right side. He half-fell, half-manuevered himself into a sitting position with his back flush against the metal side of the airflow vent, his breath coming in short bursts. His fingers found hot blood spreading over the smooth surface of his black uniform, and a ragged bullet hole halfway between his collarbone and his shoulder. He probed the hole and had to muffle a scream. He banged his head against the metal behind him in frustration, and a bullet pinged off the side of the air conditioning unit just below where he sat. 

He groaned and reached for the gun holstered to his thigh. With his blood-covered left hand, he picked off the men remaining on the roof until he was alone. It wasn’t until the end that his hand began to shake, but still he kept the pistol out, balancing it on top of his left knee and aiming it at the closest of the two doors. He was pretty confident no men had emerged since the doctor took his flying leap into the copter, but then again, not being careful about his surroundings was what had gotten him into this mess in the first place. A rookie mistake.

Clint cursed himself for being a damn fool, and wanted to curse Nat for distracting him with her insane leap into the night but truth be told, that wasn’t the case. Truth was, she’d been distracting from day one, with her lithe grace and the way her leather suit clung to her body. She’d been distracting from the moment he’d laid eyes on her through his scope, days before he made the reckless choice to turn her instead of killing her. The curve of a smile on her lips during training was enough for him to drop his guard and allow her to hand his ass to him on a plate; one moment’s distraction on his part that she never let him forget. She’d been so distracting that he’d learned to deal with it, to zone out during missions and ignore the carnal instincts flooding his brain. 

An involuntary gasp left him as the pounding rain began to make its way into his wound. He breathed through the pain, ragged breaths that shook his whole chest, until it subsided back to the screaming fire it had been before. Natasha.

During missions he retreated into routine and practice, keeping his eyes focused on the goal. So what went wrong this time? Why did his heart jump when she had jumped, suddenly concerned for her reckless need to endanger herself?Likely because he couldn’t picture a world without her. He realized he was treading on dangerous ground, coming close to admitting that his feelings for her were stronger than just sexual. 

His eyes drifted closed unconsciously, and he frantically jerked them open with a shake of the head that made him see stars. 

“Coming your way, Barton.”

He jerked fully awake then, the shock at hearing her voice overriding the pain ebbing away at his senses. 

“Tasha?”

There was silence. Had he imagined her voice - an auditory hallucination, like water for his parched senses?

“What the hell did you call me?” There was a smile in her voice, and he realized he’d called her that out loud, a pet name he used for her in his head but would never dare say to her face.

“Sorry,” he groaned. “Gonna need a little help here. What’s your ETA?”

“Almost on top of you, big guy. Also, I like the nickname. Use it, trademark it, whatever.”

Clint tried to sit up straighter to see where Natasha could be coming from, but the waves of searing pain coming from his chest threatened to take his vision with every movement, and he settled back into his position. He holstered his pistol with shaking hands and waited.

The roar of the helicopter came from behind him as Natasha piloted the craft in a lazy arc around him to land on the roof below. She waved and grinned as she opened the door in invitation.

“Got us a ride, and barely even caused any damage. Mission accomplished, so get in here and let’s get the hell out of this shit hole.” Her voice carried on the receiver in his ear, which was good because the whirl of the blades drowned out any noise the red-haired figure on the craft made. 

“Yeah, um,” his voice trailed off and he gestured at himself with his blood-covered left hand. “Gonna need a hand.”

Even from a distance he saw her eyes go wide. She mouthed a word that looked suspiciously like “Shit” and jumped from the pilot’s seat to the roof before sprinting to the AC unit he sat on. She pulled herself up to where he sat, and her eyes went from the wound in his chest to his face, likely noting the pain she saw creased into his mouth and eyes. 

“How’re you doing?” she asked.

He snorted a laugh, or tried to. “Great,” he murmured. “I feel like an asshole.”

“Ok, Barton.” Her voice was even and steady. Falling back on her training, of course, that was Natasha’s M.O. “We’re gonna get you to that helicopter and stop the bleeding. Then we’re going to fly this damn thing straight to the helicarrier and find you some of your favorite medics, ok? The good ones, not those assholes who get bored treating non-mutants. Everything’ll be fine.”

He nodded and began to carefully scoot along the ledge to the edge of the unit, taking deep breaths all the while. Natasha jumped down first, grabbing his bow where he’d discarded it, and held her hands up for him. In the rain she looked like a statue of Mother Mary he’d seen in a courtyard somewhere; arms up-stretched and face hopeful toward the heavens. Beautiful. He tried to go over gracefully but ended up falling, his legs crumpling beneath him as he hit the roof hard to land on his side. He yelled and hated himself for doing it. 

“Clint!” There was fear on her face, briefly, but then Clint’s eyes closed so he couldn’t see the naked emotion anymore. He had been hit before, and hurt in a variety of ways, so why then did this wound hurt so damn much? Because he’d fired his bow, requiring strong muscles on both sides of his body, with a bullet lodged in one of those all-important muscles. He took a few deep gasping breaths before opening his eyes to see Natasha with her finger pressed to her ear, frantically comming Coulson. He realized a moment later that she’d used a private channel. 

“Dammit Phil, this is serious! I need medical evac now, and none of that bureaucratic shit is gonna cut it!” She listened for a moment before growing deadly still. “And what am I supposed to do til then? He’ll bleed out by morning.” Another pause. “I’m coming to you. And you damn well better have a superhero on hand to protect you, or I’ll knock you into next week.”

She cursed in disgust and knelt beside him. “C’mon, I got you.” She hooked an arm under his good one and helped him to stand, then supported him on the slow walk to the helicopter. 

He managed one word. “Shield?”

She shook her head. “Tied up in Luxembourg, can’t be here till tomorrow. Can’t get a med team in here because of ‘issues with Russian relations.’ Whatever the hell that means.”

“Means we just killed thirty or so dirtbags and stole a helicopter on a mission the Russians weren’t briefed on.” He managed to get the whole sentence out without passing out, which in his mind was a minor miracle.

“Don’t forget about kidnapping,” Natasha replied as she slid open the door to the main cabin, revealing a bloodied Dr. Kahlov, hands and feet cuffed to the rail on the far side of the cabin. 

Clint laughed, a short huff of noise that exhausted him. He climbed in with Nat’s help and collapsed onto his back on the bench opposite Kahlov. She jumped in with him and rustled around on the floor before pressing a bunch of fabric to his wound. He grunted and struggled to keep still. 

“Sorry,” she muttered. “Don’t even have a jacket to take off to give you. Hope you don’t mind one of Kahlov’s shirts from his Bahamas suitcase.” 

“I mind,” the heavily accented voice coming from their prisoner was mildly perturbed.

“Shut up,” both Clint and Natasha said in unison. 

“You want I help fix? For a price, of course.” His beady eyes watched Natasha’s ministrations closely. Clint found himself fascinated by the slight smile on his narrow face. What did the bastard have to be happy about? Out of all the bad guys they’d caught, this guy was pretty disgusting. A real asshole of the medical variety, doing illegal experiments on humans and selling the results to the highest bidder. Why risk your reputation with the FDA in the states when you could pay this fucker to do your pharmaceutical tests for you in a city no American could find on a map? 

Natasha turned briefly to Kahlov, deadly serious. “There’s a hole on your face, doctor. And if you don’t see fit to close it, then I will, and you will not like my methods.” The man merely nodded once, keeping his mouth shut. 

“Clint,” Natasha kept her voice low as she turned back to him. “I need to get us out of here and find you some help. You ok?”

He nodded a fraction of an inch. “Yeah.” 

She searched his eyes. He knew she didn’t have a choice in believing him, but he held her eyes with his own long enough to make her think he wasn’t lying, that he’d actually be fine. As soon as she jumped into the pilot’s chair, his eyelids closed. The monumental effort of staying awake through the pain dissolved away into blackness.

 

 

Clint caught glimpses, sounds. A dull alarm in his brain screamed at him to wake up, to be aware of his surroundings because it could save his life, but his body couldn’t comply. He smelled wet leaves and trees, felt solid ground below him and warmth to his side, and then all was dark again. Water was being forced down his throat and he gasped and sputtered his way through it. Voices came to him out of the mist, some real and some from his past — 

A splash of liquid fire brought a scream to his lips and his eyes flew open, his body arching off the ground. Nat was there, her hands on his chest and her lips murmuring comforting words, pushing him back down and setting a bottle of vodka down by her side. Pink-tinged liquor ran from his chest and arm to the forest floor below and _fuck it hurt_.

“Clint, do you copy?” She said, and he had no idea what she meant until he noticed Dr. Khalov kneeling next to her in the morning light, turning a scalpel over in his gloved hands. 

His eyes widened and she had to hold him still yet again as he thrashed. When he found his voice, “No! He’s a madman.”

Natasha nodded. “And we’re hours away from extraction and he’s our only hope, Clint. You’re going into shock and you’re whiter than I care to see you, and the bullet’s moved too far for me to find using battlefield surgery. Believe it not, this guy does actually have a medical degree.”

“Helicopter?” he gasped.

“Ran outta fuel two hundred clicks out of the city. Had to put her down here, and by then your pulse was thready. Think it through. This is our only choice.” Her voice was calm throughout, but he could feel her hand shaking where it rested on his stomach. 

Clint grunted. “Just make sure he doesn’t do anything else when he’s in there. Don’t need a third arm growing from my chest.”

Her smile doesn’t quite reach the corners of her mouth. “But think of all the archery tricks you could pull off!”

He grabbed her hand with his good one and caught her eye. “If anything happens you tell Coulson -”

She squeezed his hand gently and dammit to hell, his heart flopped in his useless chest. “Shut up.” She stood and moved to Clint’s good side, allowing the silent doctor to set up his tools nearer the bullet hole. He turned away from that sight and instead looked up at his partner. If he came out of this, he was going to need to get a hold of himself, but for now watching her face soothed him. Morning light illuminated her hair, lining every part of her face with achingly perfect beauty.

She pulled out a piece of wood an inch thick wrapped in cotton from her pocket and waited for his nod before gently settling it between his teeth. He bit down on the unfamiliar object and gritted his jaw. After a glance at the doctor, Natasha took his hand again, and pressed on his unharmed shoulder with the other. 

The doctor began cutting.

Jets of agony radiated through him and he screamed through the mouth guard, every muscle in his neck taut and his teeth digging holes in the wood. The hole widened, the doctor now inserted another tool and began searching for the bullet, probing the dark interior of his chest for the foreign object. The slow scraping of metal against muscle drove him over the edge and back down to oblivion. 

 

 

When he next awoke, it was to a dull throbbing pain mercifully far away. Someone had bound his right arm in a sling and tied it tightly around the middle of his chest, and the lack of movement there felt more comforting than alarming, despite his usual need of both limbs to operate his weapon of choice. Evening sunlight filtered through the tall oaks that stood watch, and he grunted in surprise at this fact. When had Coulson’s “two hours” turned into nearly twelve?

“How is pain?” The nasally voice of the doctor reached him, but he wasn’t in Clint’s field of vision. Must be tied to a tree behind him then.

“Good,” he croaked out, trying to struggle to a more upright position. He hated lying flat on the ground; made him feel both helpless and foolish, two feelings he’d been trying to avoid since childhood.

The doctor tsk tsked at the movement. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“I’m a horrible patient, doc. Not that you’re gonna stick around long enough to learn that.”

“No,” and the doctor came into view from Clint’s right. “No, I will not.”

He was holding one of those ugly old Russian pistols, the kind old women hide in purses in bad neighborhoods, and Natasha was nowhere to be seen. Despite Clint’s current ridiculous feelings for his partner, he didn’t feel alarm at that, knowing that if Kahlov had done something as stupid as pull a gun on Tasha he’d be dead before he’d completed the gesture. So she was away, then, and how in the hell had the weaselly old man gotten free?

Clint took a breath, not lifting his eyes from the ivory-handled gun held in the doctor’s steady hands. “Ok, so this is how you’re going to play it huh? You know this is just gonna get you killed right?”

The doctor scoffed. “Romanava has gone to get radio signal and you cannot kill me, agent. You cannot get up.”

“And me not getting up means what exactly? Look, my partner could kill you with her thighs - her thighs! You think I don’t have tricks up my sleeve?” Clint stalled, hoping the doctor’s ego would keep him talking. He knew men like this, and generally speaking they were pretty predictable.“Besides, why save my life just to kill me? Oh wait, I know. Because you’re a crazy man who cuts people open for fun.”

Kahlov spared a glance over his shoulder, then met Clint’s eyes, his eyes blazing. “Crazy? How many medicines, how many cures, come from my work? You know cutting people open, experimenting, that is science! It is how we learn! You would not understand. Your vision is closed, focused too narrow. But I see big picture!”

Clint saw big picture too. He saw the way the setting sun was beginning to hit Kahlov’s eyes through a gap in the trees, and would impair his vision in moments. He felt the reassuring weight of his knife at his belt, grateful Natasha hadn’t done something so stupid (so enticing) as undress him to fix his bullet wound. Clint saw these things, and he waited; one of the things Hawkeye was very, very good at.

The doctor was continuing to rant now, gesturing with the gun the way movie villains do. “And I emerge victorious! Once world is crippled by disease and pain, and who stops this? Yuri Kahlov. And no one will remember your name, or her name. Only me. I will rise to the —”

Kahlov gasped and looked down, at the knife Clint had thrown with left-handed precision directly into his heart. The gun fell from his grip and he looked at the agent, still lying prone on his back, with something bigger than surprise, something more like shock in his eyes. He fell to the forest floor with a gurgle, and then moved no more.

Clint smiled and rested his head back on the bundle of clothes behind his head. “Still got it.”

After about an hour of waiting for Natasha while the body of Dr. Khalov began to smell a few yards away, Clint finally heard rustling in the direction of his feet. He pulled his pistol from his thigh holster with his left hand and called out Natasha’s name. When she broke through the underbrush, leaves in her hair and the darkness of the night settling around her, he broke into a wide grin.

“So good to see you,” he joked lazily. “Brought you a present.”

She made a face when she saw Kahlov face down on the ground. “You’re just like the puppy I never wanted.”

“Cats bring you dead treats, not dogs.”

Natasha circled Kahlov to make sure he was dead. “Yeah, well, you remind me much more of a puppy than a housecat, Barton. What the hell happened?”

He filled her in and Natasha sighed. “Technically the mission was “dead or alive,” but I’m sure there will be some people out there will be angry he can’t stand trial.”

Clint tried to shrug. “It was him or me, though, and I’ve kinda got a soft spot in my heart for me.”

Natasha grinned. “You’re not the only one.” She moved towards him. “C’mon, we’ve gotta get you up. Coulson’s picking us up in thirty.”

As she helped him to stand, then gathered their things from the clearing, Clint replayed her words over and over. Unless he was mistaken, that “You’re not the only one” might have been an indication of real affection from the unyielding statue known as the Black Widow.

 

 

Later, when they stood at the edge of the treeline and watched a small aircraft fly towards them, she held his good hand and squeezed it. “Glad we got through this ok, Barton. I’d hate to have to train another partner to put up with my crap.”

He smiled in the dark, and squeezed her hand back. “Understood.”

And that was the beginning.

 

 

 


End file.
